Ruin
by Zettel
Summary: Post-Finale. The eve of big changes for Chuck.
1. The Eve of the Beginning

**Ruin**

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Chapter One: The Eve of the Beginning

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A/N1: A little story that bubbled up. Probably three chapters. Certainly short.

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Chuck had the ring in his pocket.

Or, more accurately, he had the ring in a box in his pocket. Or, more accurately, he had the ring - in a box - in his pocket - in his car - on a side street - of Burbank - on his way home. It was like that rigamarole of childhood: in the woods, there was an egg - the egg was in a nest - the nest was on a branch - the branch was on a limb…

Rigamarole. A musical form of spiraling.

Chuck was on his way to propose.

He had been dating Taylor for about eight months. He had waited for Sarah for two years after she left him on the beach. For almost all of those two years, he had awakened believing that _today is the day_, _today Sarah comes home. _But today always became tomorrow and he remained alone.

Alone - with the Intersect.

He told no one he had downloaded the Intersect again.

Beckman suspected it, maybe she knew it, but she never made it an issue. She could see he was suffering enough. He never updated it, and it became dusty, moldered. Current events passed it by and left it outdated. New bad guys replaced the old bad guys. It was like professional sports - the spy vs. spy uniforms stayed the same, but the people wearing them just kept changing. It became possible for him to watch the news without a flash, to read the newspaper without a flash. His life became unflashy.

He quit the Buy More.

He got a cubicle job when one bit of the wreckage of Roark Industries bobbed to the surface. Chuck appreciated the irony, but it did not make his daily work better or worse. He rose in the company, becoming Head of Gaming in short order. He liked the work; it was better than the Buy More. It was honest, clean - unlike spying. He settled in and settled down, finding the normal life he had wanted.

Morgan and Alex moved away a few months after Devon and Ellie - also to Chicago. He talked to all of them on the phone, but he rarely flew to Chicago.

Christmas was the only time he committed himself to visit. It was all too painful: they all worked overtime not to talk about Sarah, and that meant she was the constant unspoken topic of conversation. Absent Sarah was everywhere in Ellie's house or in Morgan's apartment. Chuck joked bitterly to himself that they should all be wearing T-shirts that read: "I'm not thinking about Sarah."

The only good thing that came out of the Christmas visit was Taylor.

On his way home after the second visit, so depressed that each breath hurt, he ran into her - physically, ran into her - on the concourse at The Bob Hope Airport.

Taylor. She was tall, thin, elegant. She taught poetry at UCLA. Gentle, kind, remarkably articulate but not talky, she found his awkward attempts at apology after almost knocking her down appealing. They ended up having coffee together at the airport. They talked effortlessly. She was open, honest, direct.

He knew more about her, her family, her childhood and her later life after a two-hour conversation than he had known about Sarah in all their time together. When he got up to go, Taylor asked for his number and gave him hers. Her real number. Her real name. She called him the next day and they had their first official date that night. A real date - it was one and each knew it and knew the other knew it.

It was Chuck's first date since Sarah left.

He had expected the evening to pass under a funereal pall, but it had been...fun. Taylor had written a short lyric about their airport meeting, "Crash Landings", and she read it to him. It was warm and silly, despite its formal beauty, and although it was not a romantic poem, Chuck felt romantic and romanced for the first time in forever.

He held Taylor's hand at the end of the evening, and he asked her out again.

Slowly, hesitantly, he shared his story with her, the abridged version.

He managed to hide exactly what had happened to him, exactly why Sarah had entered - and exited - his life. But he told her enough to feel like he was opening up to her and was not lying. He was surprised that she seemed so interested in him. For a while, he even got paranoid about it - paranoid enough to call Casey, who was working for the NSA in DC, and ask him to run a check on Taylor. The report came back "squeakier than squeaky-clean", as Casey put it. Casey understood the situation, and when he ended the call, he took a moment to say something unCasey-like.

"Be happy, Chuck. Let her go. Sarah. I don't have any idea where she is and she hasn't contacted me since we parted in Castle. I hoped for more from her, but...Anyway, be happy, Chuck. This Taylor, she seems great."

Chuck kept dating Taylor.

He was surprised that she was willing to take it as slow as Chuck needed to take it. He moved like a glacier. They dated for two months before he kissed her. They still had not slept together, months later. He now wanted to sleep with her and was hoping that tonight would be the night: he was finally able to imagine sleeping with Taylor without it feeling like he was contemplating adultery.

And he wasn't. Or only technically, and not for long.

Divorce papers arrived about two months after he started dating Taylor. There had been nothing in the envelope from Sarah. Just a letter from a lawyer - instructions about the forms and the nature of the divorce - and a stack of papers with Sarah's signature at the bottom of the final one.

It was as close to her as he had been since the beach. Nothing in all that time - almost three years.

He sat and stared at that signature for several nights, pouring drinks as he did, until the signature swam in a syrup of exhaustion and alcohol. Finally, he shattered the whiskey glass violently against the wall and signed the papers. Underlined his signature. He thought about calling the lawyer, trying to find Sarah, talk to her. Something. Anything. But it was obvious that she did not want that. She was Sarah Walker - or would be again tomorrow after the divorce, presumably - and she could easily find him if she had any interest in him.

He was not hiding, not even hiding in plain sight. He was in the phone book. On Facebook. Anyone could find him; it did not take a spy.

Ellie argued with him about it, maddened by his passivity, his unwillingness to fight for Sarah.

But Ellie just didn't get it. He had fought for her with everything he had for five years. He had lost. Like Clint Eastwood said, or Dirty Harry: _a man's gotta know his limitations._

When Sarah walked away after the kiss she asked for, and after he told her their story, she had told him wordlessly that he offered nothing for which she was willing to fight. He was tired, too tired to fight for them alone. He stayed on the beach until the tide washed her footprints away. If everything went right tonight, maybe a different kind of tide would wash her footprints from his heart.

It was time to move on.

He'd been on Sarah's chain since she left that fake card at the Buy More. Fake. It was time to break free. Her walking away, never contacting him, proved that it had all been fake. Maybe she had fooled herself too - but she had certainly fooled him. It was like a long con or a disgusting honeytrap - and he was the sucker, the mark, whose life had been ruined by it. All the power had been hers, all along. Or, what power wasn't hers was Graham's or Beckman's. Chuck was essentially powerless, despite the Intersect. The ending proved it. He'd been a computerized human lab rat, and Sarah had been his spy maze.

But the maze had collapsed and left him directionless and lost, his head full of the Intersect, his heart empty of everything that mattered.

It was time to build on the ruins, bury his past. Bury Sarah.

Hell, for all he knew, she was dead. She had been alive long enough to sign and date the divorce papers, but who knew after that? He assumed she had gone under deep cover, deep enough to drown all memory of him and of Burbank.

He turned the corner.

He was just a couple of blocks from his apartment. Taylor was supposed to meet him there. He was, he realized, early. Ahead of schedule. He'd been able to get off work to go to the jewelry store, and he had allowed more time to run the errand than it had taken.

A car whizzed past him, blowing its horn. Chuck groused to himself. The truth was that he was unsure whether it was the pain of losing Sarah or his anger at her complete abandonment of him that held sway over him most often. He was sure he was losing the ability to tell them apart.

He drove to his apartment and got out of the car. He stood there for a while, breathing in and breathing out. He felt queasy, suddenly. The ring in his pocket seemed heavy. His feet felt as if they were sinking into the asphalt.

His phone beeped.

He fished it out of his other pocket. Taylor was running late, stuck on campus with a prospective student. Chuck texted her back that he would be at the apartment whenever she got there. She sent him a heart emoji. They had never used the word 'love' to each other. He knew Taylor had been on the verge of it a number of times recently, but that she could see him preparing to hear it and see his subtle wince. The problem was that he thought he loved her. He knew he loved Sarah - but he had lost touch with that feeling and was no longer confident he could recognize it in himself.

He felt like his heart had been overtaken by briars, sharp, long and sinister - he could not get close enough to it to tell if it was still capable of tender emotions. It beat; that was all Chuck knew. He hoped Taylor could help him work past the briars, back into meaningful contact with his heart.

He opened his apartment door and went inside. He had forgotten and left the lights on. Not a typical mistake, but he had been so distracted for the last few days, he had no memory even of eating meals. He liked his new place. The old one was too full of Sarah's absence.

Dropping his keys in the bowl on the kitchen table, he went to the refrigerator and got a bottle of water.

He walked into the living room.

Sarah was standing there, a picture in her hands. It was a recent photograph of Chuck and Taylor, taken at the last San Diego Comic-Con. Taylor had framed it as a gift.

Sarah had tears on her face.

Chuck stood there, looking at her, unable to move, unable to think. She glanced up from the photograph, although it was obvious he had not surprised her when he walked in.

"That's Taylor?"

"Sarah?"

"Hi, Chuck."

She said his name as she said it on the beach when she asked him to kiss her, said it as she had always said it. It sounded like she had never been gone, never forgotten, - like his wife.

It killed him.

A deep pain lacerated his chest. Pain. Love. He recognized it, felt it in his wildly beating heart.

And anger. He was so angry that he could not speak. So angry. Almost three years.

He glared at her so that she took a step back, shrinking from him. Sarah Bartowski - soon to be Sarah Walker again, presumably - retreated. He had only seen her physically retreat once before, as she left him on the beach.

"How do you know who she is?"

Sarah shrugged, the shrug small, embarrassed, confessional. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her bent wrist. "I've kept up with you, Chuck."

His anger roared, shook the sky - but he kept his voice quiet. "What? You've had me under surveillance?"

She smiled sadly. "No, Chuck, nothing that...official, that...professional. No cameras or bugs or anything like that. No hacking of your emails."

"But then how?"

"Ellie."

"My sister, Ellie?"

"I don't have many friends, Chuck. Yes, your sister." He dropped the bottle of water, unopened, on the floor.

Chuck felt his fingernails dig into his palms as his fist clenched. They clenched so tightly he thought his hands might never open again.

"Why would she spy on me for you?"

"Because she knew the truth, Chuck. Knew where I was and why I couldn't come back to you, no matter how desperately I wanted to."

He shook his head, unsure of her words, what they could mean. "Deep cover, I suppose. But why could you contact her when you couldn't contact me?"

"It's complicated."

It took a moment. The two words seemed to dance in the air like sparks, and then they touched his banked rage and it exploded, mushrooming into a cloud of agony.

"It's complicated? It's complicated?" He was screaming at her, advancing with each repetition of her words. She retreated again. "It's complicated?" And then the rage tottered and collapsed and so did he.

He fell to his knees in front of her. "Please, Sarah, shoot me. I can't stand this. I wish...I wish...I wish I were dead."

Sarah was weeping now, her shoulders shaking. She knelt too. She reached for him. He leaned back, collapsing on his bottom, his Chucks rising into the air between them.

"Don't touch me, Sarah. I don't know you. I never knew you. Tomorrow morning we will be nothing to each other legally. I have been nothing to you for three years. I'm not going to let you ruin me completely, not when I am ready to rebuild."

Sarah sat on her heels and put her face in her hands. Chuck got up. He walked to the apartment door. "Taylor will be here soon. You need to be gone."

She got up and walked toward him, her face a mess of running mascara. "You don't want to know, Chuck? You don't want to hear my story?"

He shook his head. "The only truths you've ever told me were at best lies you talked yourself into believing. A honeytrap you somehow conned yourself into believing was real - for a little while."

"I was never a honeytrap spy. You know that. I should have known Quinn was lying; I would never have done what he told me, not even if his accusations against you had been true. I know that now. I was just so confused. The Sarah that I was for those few days - she is not a Sarah I ever was, Chuck. She was lost and memory-less, aching with a feeling that she did not understand and that terrified her. Desperate and alone. Even before Budapest, I was never that Sarah. And I am me again. Sarah, your Sarah. I want to come home."

Chuck's met her gaze, her blue imprecation. For a second, his heart grew tender; but then he thought about the past, about her being in contact with Ellie, about his long misery.

"You don't do home, Sarah. Not really. Just go."

She nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks again. "I'm sorry, Chuck. I love you. Always have." She walked out unsteadily.

Chuck slammed the door behind her, more to shut himself in than to shut her out.

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A/N2: Thoughts?


	2. Shame and Necessity

A/N1: Read, don't assume.

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**Ruin**

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Chapter Two: Shame and Necessity

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Sarah jumped as the door slammed.

She was a spy no longer but she still hated surprises - and that surprised her. It shouldn't have. She had feared Chuck's anger, feared that he would be unable to forgive her. Maybe she had even expected it. But the rage in his eyes, the heat, and depth of it, the pain. He had asked her to shoot him.

She bubbled out a cry, inarticulate pain, self-loathing. No stranger to self-loathing, not even self-loathing prompted by her mistreatment of the man she loved so - and so poorly, so clumsily, so badly - she knew its taste well.

He deserved the best of her.

She did not know what that was, or if the term even had meaning anymore.

All introspection revealed was the worst of her, a comparative term somehow transmuted to an absolute. _Worst_. She was the worst. Loved as few women have been loved, she had walked away from then betrayed that love - a betrayal for which she did not even have thirty pieces of silver to show.

She had golden rings, engagement, wedding, to show for it but they were in her pocket. She had feared to put them on, fearing the presumption, worse even than breaking into his apartment - a fact Chuck mercifully had not mentioned.

She had shame aplenty to show for it. So much shame. She was ashamed of herself and rightfully so.

She had not meant to be as dumbfounded, as lost, as she was when he found her.

But she had turned on a light in the dark apartment and noticed the bare walls. Hypnotized by their emptiness, she had wandered along, lightly dragging her fingers where there should have been family photos, posters, displays of mementos. Nothing but the dull white paint. White, all through the apartment, the same shade. She recognized it - she had recently painted her own apartment and she recalled pausing over the sample: _snowbound _\- and wondered at it. Nowhere were the saturated colors of the apartment they had shared. It was as though Chuck's life had become non-chromatic, all black and white and grey.

Nothing of hers was anywhere in sight. The furniture was all new. There was not a candle, not a knick-knack, not a coaster she had touched. Chuck had erased her from his life just as he rejected all chromatic color. His bed was new, a double bed. It lacked a headboard or footboard - it was a mattress on a box springs on a frame. Hardly a bed except in the most brutal Brutalist terms. Function consuming form.

She had gone down the hall and noticed the framed photograph of Chuck and Taylor. They stood under a Comic-con sign, wearing costumes but Sarah could neither identify nor understand them. Chuck looked like he was wearing a black spacesuit; Taylor like she was royalty.

Sarah was studying the photograph when Chuck came in and could not put it down. It seemed to mean something but she did not know what it was.

And then he came in and she lost her mind. It plunged into her heart and drowned in her heart's blood. Nothing she had planned was said. Almost all that was said should have been saved for some later date, in hopes of a later date. But she had always sucked, absolutely _sucked_ at talking about her feelings and when she most needed to, all she managed were two lines at the door, two lines too late. Chuck had thrown her out. She didn't blame him.

Chuck was bad at talking about his feelings too, but that was because he was always protecting her. She was bad at it because she was protecting her too, not protecting him. She'd protected herself forever; it had been a condition of her existence with her father, working for Graham. Stopping it was important - she owed it to Chuck - but the debt was outstanding.

She turned to leave and saw Taylor walking along the sidewalk. She was graceful, elegant, an embodied lyric, a poem and not just a poet. She passed Sarah with a small, kind smile, sympathy in her eyes.

Sarah tore her gaze from Taylor, forced her mind from images of violence. Her jealousy was toxic, malignant and it burned like she had swallowed battery acid. She dropped her eyes and hurried past. A moment later, she heard Taylor knock but did not hear Chuck open the door.

Sarah got to her rental car and stood by the door, trying to breathe, then she got in.

Ellie was in the passenger seat with the little girl in her arms. Sarah met her gaze.

"Oh, Jesus, that bad?"

Sarah said nothing but tears fell from her eyes.

Ellie extended her arms, the little girl between them for a second. "Take your daughter, Sarah. She'll be a comfort."

Sarah took Charlie in her arms. She held her close for a moment, then let her sit back. The little girl gazed at Sarah with a fresh set of the exhausted eyes she had just seen in the apartment, Charlie's dad's eyes, Chuck's eyes. The little girl, not understanding Sarah's misery, smiled at Sarah.

"Dada?"

Sarah nearly lost her grip on her daughter. She looked at Ellie and saw instant tears in Ellie's eyes.

"I screwed it up like I knew I would, Ellie, like I told you I would. I was tongue-tied...worse. My mind would not work. I told him I had been keeping up with him and I told him you were the one who was helping me."

"Sarah!" Ellie put her forehead in her hands, staring down. "He was never going to forgive me, but now…"

"I just realized," Sarah added, blushing on top of her dejection, "I made it sound like we have been in touch ever since I left. I didn't say that, but he may believe it."

Ellie glared at her. "I love you like a sister, but I swear to God, it is only knowing you could kill me with a bobby pin that keeps me from pulling your hair out sometimes." Ellie deliberately took a breath. "So you explained nothing to him?"

Sarah started to sob. "No, nothing."

"Well, at least you are consistent - like Jack the Ripper."

"Ellie!" Sarah's sobbing became bawling. Charlie petted at Sarah's wet cheek, concerned. "Momma. Momma."

"I'm sorry, Sarah, I just can't believe you waited all this time, waited until the eleventh hour, to try to reclaim your husband and when you do, it ends up going so badly, so sadly wrong."

"I passed Taylor on my way back to the car."

"So, Chuck could be proposing while we are sitting here?"

Sarah looked at her daughter's curls. Charlie leaned against her, putting her head beneath Sarah's chin, pillowing it on her chest. "Yes, I...suppose so. I'm a miserable coward."

Ellie blew out a breath. "Yes, Sarah, you are. Where my brother is concerned, you have been a coward since you first saw him. Too afraid to have him and too afraid to lose him. That's the story of your time with Chuck; I'm now thinking it was true even when you seemed to be together, even when you got married."

Sarah closed her eyes, tears unbidden but present again. "He called our relationship, our marriage, a honeytrap. Oh, God!"

"A honeytrap? What...Oh, no, don't explain, I worked it out. Did you…?"

"No, no. Ellie, no. I 'seduced' men, used my looks and attractiveness to manipulate them, but that I wouldn't do. Some spies do, men and women, but it's never required. I didn't. It was too intimate, too final a betrayal of myself. It would have been to give myself to spying completely, and I now know I never did that. Chuck showed me that I didn't, taught me what my...refusals meant."

"But you never gave yourself completely to him either, did you, Sarah?"

"Yes, um, huh? What do you mean?"

Ellie reached over to stroke Charlie's curls. The little girl was asleep, exhausted by flying and by her immersion in the tension and emotion she did not understand.

"You losing your memory was such a blow to Chuck. It was like the woman he loved ceased to exist. And in her place - at least for a few days - was a remorseless spy bitch." Ellie lowered her voice. "I'm sorry, Sarah, and I know there are excuses, but that's how it was. You seriously threatened to kill me, remember?"

Sarah nodded, staring at the speedometer. "Yes."

"Think about how that looked to Chuck, especially when you walked away from him. It had to seem like the woman he loved had just been your deepest cover ever, and that the Intersect had, so to speak, blown your cover. It's like the stupid idea people have that when someone is drunk you see the real him or her. That's _stupid_, bone-achingly stupid, but people believe it. Chuck shouldn't have believed what he did, but he did, and you can see how...You told him you only knew how to be a spy and you walked away!"

Sarah kissed her daughter's head. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"Because you left me too until that burner phone showed up a year ago. And then you were so skittish, I was afraid that anything I said might make you unreachable again.

"It took you weeks and weeks to tell me about Charlie, that my brother had a daughter and I had a niece. I tried to find you, you know." Sarah gave Ellie a puzzled glance and dropped her head. "You are good, Sarah. I sent Mom after you and she couldn't find you."

Sarah looked up, then nodded. "Oh."

"And then, after nothing but phone calls, you show up in person on my doorstep with Charlie and want us to go to Burbank and stop my brother's proposal.

"A proposal, by the way, happening on the eve of your divorce from him, a divorce you initiated." Ellie's voice shrank. "You know, he showed me that prenup of yours, back before everything went wrong. He was so proud of it. 'Never use the word 'divorce'.' - So much for the prenup, huh, Sarah?"

Sarah blanched. "I had to know, Ellie, I had to know if he could give me up, if he was done with me. He is. I looked around in his apartment. Have you been inside it?"

"No, when we've visited, it's been in Chicago, Christmas."

"It's all...off-white, Ellie. Empty. One photo of him and Taylor at Comic-Con. I didn't get their costumes but they were dressed up." Sarah sighed shakily and teared up again. "It's the picture that replaces ours from our first Halloween together, I guess. He belongs to her…"

Ellie got a curious look in her eyes. "You know, for all the differences I gather there are between you and Taylor, she's no more up a Sci-Fi nerd than you were, back in the day, less up on it than you are now."

Sarah gave Ellie a long look. "So?"

"Did you think about that picture? Chuck sent it to me by email just the other day, I wondered why it took him so long….anyway, I never had a chance to show it to you. But I figured it out."

"I wouldn't have wanted to see it," Sarah said, her lips a trembling line, "but I have now - and I don't understand. Figured out _what?_"

"_Dune_, Sarah. Did you ever see that awful movie with the giant sandworms, spice worms? Or, more importantly, read the books?"

Sarah shook her head gently, so as not to wake Charlie.

"Well, in the photograph Chuck is dressed as Paul Atreides, in a Freman desert suit. Taylor is Princess Irulan. Chuck told me they chose her because Taylor looks like the actress who played her, Virginia Madsen, although Taylor is darker, more...willowy. But their faces are similar, I grant."

Sarah felt sick, beaten. Trying to listen to Ellie was too taxing.

Sarah's heart was aching so much - and she was so close to Chuck- and she had his daughter in her arms - and he did not know she existed - and that would be another reason for him to hate her - and…

"Sarah," Ellie said sharply snapping her fingers. "Stop spiraling. You would pick up one of Chuck's bad traits…"

Sarah smiled a hurting smile. "I like it when he spirals, it's like a wordy carnival ride."

Ellie huffed. "Listen. In the story, in _Dune, _Paul marries Princess Irulan but he never really loves her, not as he does his Freman wife, Chani. He marries Irulan for all sorts of complicated reasons but she never replaced Chani; he never loved her."

"Wait, so...I'm...Chani." Sarah sat up, color instantly in her cheeks.

"The sleeper has awakened. Hallelujah! Now, go and fight for your husband. Don't make me regret telling you about _Dune. _And if you ever tell Chuck I read those books, I will deny it."

They heard running steps on the pavement. Taylor went by, her face red, tears running down it.

She got in a car nearby and leaned her forehead on the steering wheel, her shoulders shaking. Ellie and Sarah both stared at her, sad - and happy - and guilty. After a few minutes, she wiped her face in her hands and drove away.

The two women were silent for a time, then Ellie spoke softly. "I guess Chuck's consistent too, at least today. Are you going to go talk to him?"

"Yes."

"Are you taking Charlie?"

"Not yet. Can you wait with her a little longer? I promise, this time I will explain. I'll text you when it's time to come up. I'll try to straighten out the confusion about your role in all this too."

"Thanks. He'll listen, Sarah. It's Chuck. No matter how pissed, it's pissed _Chuck. _But you have got to be _there_, be prepared to be open to him. If you hold back, you will ruin it all, permanently."

Sarah nodded and handed Charlie to Ellie carefully. "That's my _mission_."

Ellie sighed, shaking her head. "Good God, no, Sarah. _That's_ your husband."

As Sarah got out of the car, she stopped, standing in the open door. She remembered being in bed with Chuck around the time of their wedding. Chuck had called her 'the most mysterious woman in the world.' He had meant it as a compliment of a sort, but she could now see how it foreshadowed later events, and how it shaped his understanding of what she had done after losing her memory and then after walking away from him on the beach.

She took a breath. Ellie was right.

She, Sarah Bartowski - she did not want to be Sarah Walker - she was a coward. Too afraid to have him and too afraid to lose him.

_Afraid_.

Shame and necessity. She had to explain.

She shut the car door quietly.

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A/N2: One last long chapter to go.

I'm closing in on the end of my Western, "Heaven and Hell" if you're interested. It's hella good.


	3. Princess of Tides

A/N1: Final chapter. Takes a bit. Take a breath.

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**Ruin**

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Chapter Three: Princess of Tides

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Sarah walked back to Chuck's door, struck by the out-of-nowhere, funny-not-funny thought that the path from his door to the parking lot was a trail of fresh tears, first Sarah's, second Taylor's.

Sarah feared she would trek it a third time in a moment, freshening it a final time.

As she walked, she tried to organize her thoughts, remember how the last 32 months of her life had gone, where they had gone.

Ellie was right - Sarah had pushed Chuck past even his limits. He was the epitome of the long-suffering man, Job with a pocket protector. Sarah took everything from him - and now she was here possibly to do it a second time. If he could not forgive her, he would never forgive himself _for that. _Maybe he was already there, already blaming himself for blaming her, and maybe that was feeding his rage, Chuck's unforgiveness two-edged, slicing deep into him even as it sliced deep into her.

She knew she had suffered for him too, during those early years in Burbank - but she had always had the advantage of knowledge, of the power of knowledge. She knew he loved her; he could only guess at her feelings. She never helped him. Marooned on Unrequited Island, all he could do was hope for a message in a bottle. But even her messages were oracles, riddles, hard to decipher, not plain speakings but ambiguous signs.

The scene of Chuck in her hospital room, humiliated by his modest bouquet in the face of Bryce's array of expensive bouquets, came back to her. Knowing how much he loved her, how much he wanted her, knowing how much everything with Bryce had hurt him, yet again undermined him, all she could manage was "Not always" in response to his comment about always losing to Bryce. For all Chuck knew, she could have been talking about the contest of bouquets, not the contest for her heart. All those years with her father and then all the years with Graham had forked her tongue - she could not be honest when she honestly wanted to. Every word she spoke was divided.

She had to be honest now. Stopping, she glanced back at the rental car. _Charlie_. Sarah loved her little girl so much. She knew that Chuck would love her too, just as much, no matter how he felt about Sarah.

For a moment, going back for Charlie seemed an appealing option. She decided against it. It was too much like using her daughter as a tiny human shield.

Shields. Walls. Deflections. Obscurements. Camouflage. The basic existential categories of Sarah's life. She needed to diagram a new sentence. If she could, then maybe she could also, Queen of Hearts, change Chuck's verdict.

_Charlie_. Yet again, Sarah had the knowledge and power. Her stupid decision to send the divorce papers - another display of knowledge and power. It hit her, hard and sudden, standing there, that _this_ was why she hated surprises - because a surprise undid knowledge and power. The surprised person was vulnerable and ignorant, at least regarding the surprise. That was what it meant for it to be a _surprise_.

_Too afraid to have him and too afraid to lose him._

For a time, early in Burbank, Sarah's refusal to speak or speak plainly were attempts to protect Chuck, to prevent him from being consigned to a bunker. But even then, her refusals were often so fierce, fierce out of all proportion to her need to protect Chuck, and that additional ferocity was her need to protect herself.

The awful truth was that Chuck had an endless, inexhaustible capacity to surprise Sarah, and she loved and adored that capacity and she feared it. It had been that capacity that she recognized after she lost her memory - after seeing her video log, after the mission with Chuck, after the story on the beach, after the kiss. Each of those things had surprised her in its way - and her love of the surprises and of the man who supplied them was matched by her terror of that man. The biggest surprise of all, the one that arched above all the others, was that he caused her to fall in love with him. She called him a gift in the wedding vows - and he was, a surprise gift.

_Too afraid to have him and too afraid to lose him. _

Sarah was so deep in thought she missed Chuck opening the door of the department. He had his car keys in his hand and was running for his car - and he ran right into Sarah as she stood, thinking.

Chuck sent Sarah sprawling backward, onto her backside, then her back. Chuck followed her fall backward with his own fall forward, and he ended up atop her, stretched along her body as if he were trying her on for size. His eyes were right above hers. _Surprise._

She saw the shock in his eyes and then a flash of relief. He quickly rolled off her but she did not want him to. Feeling his weight on her brought nights of lovemaking to mind, slow and syrupy nights, long nights, sapping them both. She shook the pictures, M-rated, from her mind. They were a help when she was a prisoner but not now.

Chuck was now sitting up beside her. He reached for his car keys and Sarah grabbed them first. She saw the relief that flashed in his eyes replaced by a flame of anger.

She sheepishly held the keys out. "She just left a few minutes ago."

"She?" Chuck blinked his eyes.

"Taylor."

"Oh." Chuck turned an uncomfortable shade of red. "I know. I mean, I know she left just a few minutes ago. But I...I wasn't going after her."

Sarah felt her heart pound. "No?"

Chuck sniffed in a breath and looked at her - and she suddenly felt the tables turn. She did not understand how to read his expression. It looked like the facing surface of a sentence in a language she did not speak, clear symbols of unclear meaning. She spoke a lot of languages but not that one. She knew she was gaping at him.

"I was coming after you."

"You thought you could find me?"

"Goddamn it, Sarah, it wasn't a spy game. It isn't a spy game. This is our life. This. Is. Our. Life."

He sounded as defeated as she suddenly felt, her flags at half-mast, unstirred by any breeze, white. No, snowbound white.

He stood. She sat on the sidewalk. He looked down at her. "I thought I might find you _there _again."

She stood quickly, brushing her backside. She saw him sneak a glance. A coquettish impulse grabbed her and she stifled it. 'Honeypot' was still in the air; seduction missions had made them both miserable and seasick in the past. She looked at him steadily instead. "At the beach? At...our...spot?"

He didn't speak but he finally nodded. "I thought maybe there was enough of Sarah Bartowski left" - he glanced at his watch - "that you'd go. If only to say goodbye."

She closed her eyes. His words seared the tender flesh of her heart. It took her a moment to gather herself after the pain. "I didn't leave, Chuck."

"Right. I gathered..."

* * *

Chuck looked at her. How could he be so angry with and so aflame with desire for the same woman? He had not slept with Taylor and he would not have slept with her - he knew that now. He hated what he had told Taylor, what he was forced to tell her, but he had to be fair, being _fair late_ better than being _unfair forever._ Taylor's eyes had been Hannah's eyes. But he couldn't love someone when that love was constructed on the denial of his love for someone else.

Sarah.

All he wanted to do was to take Sarah's hand and run with her into his apartment, into the room where he kept his bed and make it their bedroom. The feeling of her body under his felt like home - if home could burn without being consumed, like that Mosaic bush in the Hebrew Bible. Chuck was burning, burning but not consumed. He made himself look away from her.

"I wanted to find you so that once - _just once_ \- I could ask and you would answer. I need to know. I've been in the dark," the white dark, snowbound, "for so goddamn long, Sarah."

She extended her ringless hand to him, waiting for him to take it. He didn't. She left it in the air between them. "Friends?" She asked the single-word question then went on after the briefest pause, "at least for long enough to talk. I came back to answer you, Chuck."

He took her hand and shook it awkwardly, her touch had the old, always new effect on him. It galvanized him, made him feel ten feet tall. He was sure she would cut him down to size soon enough.

They walked into the apartment, Chuck holding the door. Sarah stepped inside, then waited. Chuck passed Sarah and went into the kitchen. He sat in one of the two small, unforgiving chairs he kept at the little table. In his chair. His chair facing...her chair. The always empty one. The one he kept for her. She sat down in it.

He looked at her, at a loss for words now that she was in her appointed place. She glanced around, seemingly unsure what to say, how to begin. How a woman of such passion could live at such a remove from it puzzled him again, as it often had. She was...unhandy...unavailable to herself and so unavailable to anyone else, especially, maddeningly, to him.

But she surprised him. She started. "Let me start _there_, Chuck, on the beach. Or, better, just a little before that, so that you understand, as much as I do, anyway." She swallowed hard and continued. "Remember when I came to see you at dark, after that awful day, the day I threatened...Well, you remember."

"In the courtyard, near the fountain. You came to say goodbye."

She nodded once. "Yes, and no. I came…I don't know why. No, that's not right. I couldn't leave without seeing you, saying something to you. But what I told you wasn't true. I told you I didn't feel it...love...for you. I wasn't lying but I was confused.

"Later, when I came back to you, to the Buy More, I was looking for my husband more than I was looking for Quinn. But I still didn't understand that. I kept finding you when we chased Quinn together, but each time I found you I found a version of myself that surprised me, a version of me to which I could not...project forward to from what I knew about myself. And then on the beach, when you told me our story, I found you and found me again, and even though I still didn't know how to get from _me_ to _her_, I felt that the _me_ and the _her_ were all one _I_."

She stopped and brushed a pretty shade of pink, looking at him with a hesitant playfulness. "God, I sound like a talky extra on _Doctor Who._"

Chuck smiled despite himself. He waited.

"Then you kissed me. And although my memories did not rush back, the feelings all did. I felt it and I knew what it was. I was in love with you, as a woman loves her husband. I felt a bond to you of a sort I thought I would only know by description, not by acquaintance. I felt it, Chuck, all of it, all at once, five years' worth of love and desire and unhappiness turned to happiness…"

She choked a bit and he got up and got her a bottle of water. He held it out to her and she took it, opened it, and drank. She nodded her thanks.

He sat back down, smile gone. He knew his eyes were hard, glinting and guarded, as if the refrigerator had chilled him and the water. "So," he spoke carefully, as if the words were thin ice over frigid water, "you felt it and you walked away from it."

* * *

Sarah started to respond then tasted facileness on her tongue. This was the moment Ellie had warned her about, she realized, when she could do what contributed to the mess she was in, fall back on her old habits, answer from the perspective of a handler in words meant to appease an asset. _My husband, not my mission. _

She took another drink of water and washed the initial words away. Plain confession. "Yes, that's what I did."

He glared at her and she let him, submitting to his anger and pain. And to her shame and pain - he could see them.

"I can't explain it to you, Chuck. I have no excuse. I've thought about that moment and relieved it so many times I am no longer sure if what's in my mind is recollection or imagination. All I know is that I walked away from you because I loved you. Because I couldn't trust the yes in my heart while my head was uncommitted, because you kept surprising me, and surprising me with me, because...well, there were a lot of _becauses_ and they were all in play but they don't all make sense together now and didn't then. Later, I had time to think and I understood this much: I walked away because I didn't understand that my heart had converted my head before, and would again." Plain confession. No slant, no facility.

They sat there for a while. Chuck had the cap from her water bottle and he was rolling it across the table from one of his hands to the other. She watched him.

He closed one hand around the cap and glanced up at her. "So what was your plan?"

"What you said. Deep cover. I thought I could test my heart, see if what I felt was real and lasting, by choosing a situation where that would force me to stop thinking about myself and my aching heart and my empty memory. The new CIA head gave me an assignment. We thought it would only last a few weeks or a month. I intended to come back to Burbank when I finished and work things out...or end them...depending on how it went."

He couldn't seem to look at her but he nodded, showing that he heard. "But you never came back," he observed after a moment during which he worried the sealing ring off the blue cap.

"No, and now we get to the part of the story that's most…"

"Complicated." He offered the word as the finish to her sentence but without inflection.

She did not agree but she let the word stand.

"The mission got strange. The CIA had gotten wind of a small group of rogue spies - perhaps some splinter of the Ring. Someone in the Middle East was bankrolling them. They were working to create a technology that resembled the Intersect.

"They sent in me as a rogue CIA analyst, a turncoat, a linguistic specialist who would consult with the scientists working on creating uploadable linguistic skills. So, you can see that my plan to...distract myself from my real life was...um...less than successful."

"I was making some headway, insinuating myself into the group. They trusted me more and more. The team of scientists I was working with was almost all female. I worked to befriend them, to spend time with them outside of the compound where we were working. It was a place a lot like Volkoff's, the place your mom was."

Chuck looked at her. She went on. "The compound was a former military base. It was in Georgia - the country, not the state. I learned quite a lot but my full immersion in the life there meant that I couldn't have anything with me - no communicators, nothing. Their security technology was the best I have ever seen. I couldn't contact the CIA and, although I waited, no one from the CIA contacted me. Again, it was a little like the mess Mary found herself in."

Sarah stopped. "How is Mary, Chuck?"

He shrugged. "She only knows how to be a spy. She pretends to be a mother, and her heart is in it, but it's still a cover. She can't let go of that life, a little like…"

Sarah shifted in the small, uncomfortable chair. She did not otherwise respond. She continued the story.

"So, I was expecting the mission to end, to get word to get out. I was in the lab one day, working with one woman scientist. I got up to get some water and when I came back, I guess I got distracted —because I walked into the lab and did not notice the red light for _No Admittance._ I stepped into the lab and an Intersect-like program was running on the screen. I did not have time to close my eyes. I watched it part of it before they could stop it But when it was over, it seemed to have no effect on me. The scientists were relieved but I could also tell I puzzled them, troubled them.

"That night, the compound scrambled, bugged out. Everything loaded up onto trucks. Personnel herded into 'copters. I had no chance to tell anyone what was happening, no one to tell. Even worse, it became clear as the situation unfolded, that I had been reclassified from_ co-worker_ to _prisoner_. I got stabbed with a tranq dart and woke up, not in a room, but a cell. And not on land. My cell was, as best I could tell, in the belly of a converted oil tanker somewhere at sea."

* * *

Chuck stared at her. He was caught up in the story, the narrative, and their personal issues had fallen away. He knew they would come back. He motioned for her to go on.

She took a breath. "I need to backtrack, Chuck, because I told you all that and left out the most important thing. But I wanted you to have some context."

"I pushed for the mission and was prepped and sent fast. I didn't want to be poked and prodded, so I went through no pre-mission medical check." Chuck nodded, looking slightly puzzled. "It wasn't until I was undercover and in the compound that I realized I was pregnant."

_Pregnant_.

* * *

A Harvard lecture on James Joyce, from long ago, popped from into Sarah's mind.

The lecturer had been talking about _Finnegans Wake_, and about a passage where Joyce tries to write into the text the sound of thunder. The resulting word was massive, letter after letter, and it sounded at the moment of Adam and Eve's Fall in the Garden:

_Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunnt-rovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk_

Sarah had not known what to make of it in the classroom, but in Chuck's snowbound kitchen it reverberated around the room on the heels of 'pregnant'. Chuck looked like lightning struck him.

"Pregnant?"

"Pregnant?"

Sarah braced herself and nodded. "Yes, with your baby, our baby. They trapped me in a compound with no way out, no contact. I could hide it until I ended up a prisoner, then they figured it out."

Chuck had frozen. He was looking at her as if she were a hologram and he was interested in the wall he could see through her. She saw him mouth the words 'pregnant' and 'baby'.

"The pregnancy had a strange effect on me, Chuck. At night, I dreamt of you, our life together. But the dreams weren't dreams, they were memories," she looked, Chuck seemed focused on her again, the story, "my memories, of us. I would remember us in the night, and the first thing in the morning, but as the day wore on, the memories wore thin, tattered, fell apart. By bedtime, they were irretrievable.

"Each morning I woke up as your wife, as Sarah Bartowski, but I went back to bed Agent Walker. It was maddening. But my memory was otherwise fine. My spy skills were intact and my new memories were there, in good order...and in order, if you know what I mean. I swear it was like Charlie was remembering you for me…"

Chuck jerked in his chair, his eyes locking to hers. "Charlie? We had a son?"

"No, Charlie, our daughter. I named her after you." As Chuck sat, spinning in place, Sarah slid her phone from her pocket beneath the table. She texted Ellie.

**Ten Minutes. **

Chuck finally shook his head, shook it like a wet dog trying to dry itself. His curls - Sarah had not consciously noted, but they were back, his short spy cut gone - shook on his head. His gaze when he looked at her was so full of things in so mobile an array, she could identify none.

He spoke carefully. "So you were pregnant with our daughter while held prisoner in a converted oil tanker somewhere in some ocean?"

Sarah's voice shrank. "You don't believe me?"

For the first time, he smiled at her in almost his old way, albeit a bit crazily, his eyes wide and a trifle bulging. "No. I mean, yes, yes I believe you. This. Is. Our. Life." His smile lasted a few more seconds and then he sobered up. "Our pear-shaped pineapple of a life."

Sarah jumped back in, into the space of the smile. "The Intersect they were developing did not affect me and they did not understand that. They did not doubt my cover, but they were sure my brain held some secret they needed. Luckily, their tests and so on showed nothing. I could get enough mileage out of my prior friendships to ensure I was well-treated, my pregnancy tended to. A doctor was on board. I was a prisoner, but a prisoner with pregnancy vitamins."

Chuck clenched his brow. "How did you explain the pregnancy."

Sarah dropped her eyes. "An unlucky one-night stand - on a train."

He frowned. "Keep the lie close to the truth?"

Sarah risked a grin and a flirtatious tone. "The only lie there is the prefix 'un', Chuck. I remember..." He shifted in his chair.

Sarah went on before he could reply. "Nighttime memories and daytime amnesia went on for the entire pregnancy. The tide of memories came in; the tide went out; I could only wait. I was with Charlie when awake, Chuck and Charlie when asleep.

"They were still running tests on me when I had Charlie. The birth was textbook. But delivering her delivered my memories, Chuck. That night, after she was born, I dreamt of our life and I woke up with it in my possession, not the ghostly tendrils of a dream, but memories, technicolor, and full attending emotions.

"I knew then that I was and had always been Sarah Bartowski. Forgetting who I was didn't change that. I understood. The problem was that I was Sarah Bartowski again, mother of Charlie Bartowski, but I needed to be Agent Walker."

Sarah could tell that Chuck was desperately torn. He wanted to talk about Charlie, wanted to _demand_ to talk about Charlie, but he wanted to know the story - in part because the story was about Charlie too. She pressed on.

"They began to lose interest in me. Partly that was because my immunity to their Intersect seemed inexplicable, and I certainly acted as though it was, partly because the group was feeling pressure to produce something for the men who were bankrolling them. I wasn't furthering the project.

"They worked around the clock and I spent time with Charlie. I regretted everything so much, and so much more because of Charlie. Things went on like that for months. I would get poked or prodded once in a while. Examined.

"Every few days, Charlie and I would get led up above deck for some fresh air but we were always on the water, no land in sight, no supply or refueling vessel to be seen when we were up there. I couldn't risk trying to escape or to contact anyone. I was terrified for Charlie's sake.

"But then Charlie saved us" Sarah smiled. "One of our guards fell for her. He started bringing her pieces of fruit that I could mash up and feed her. I slowly figured out the schedule of supply ships because of that.

"One day when I knew the ship was coming, I knocked out that guard," she frowned, shrugged, "and I got to the deck with Charlie. I had food and water, she was still nursing mostly. We were lucky. We slipped into an empty crate being moved from the tanker to the supply ship and we were put in the hold. I stretched out the food and water, but it was close. When the ship made port, we snuck off." She stopped. "It wasn't the first time I rescued a baby, but this time it was mine."

"I got in touch with the CIA and got us back to the States. There was a lot of confusion about Charlie, about me, about where I had been. The CIA did not know about the tanker. I had an idea about where it was because I overheard men on the supply ship. The tanker was taken, and the rogue spies captured.

Chuck leaned back in his chair. "So, my dad is a spy, my mom is a spy, my ex-wife-to-be is a spy, my sister spies on me and my daughter is a spy before she can walk and before I ever see her?"

Sarah sat and replayed the long question in her head, caught on the phrase 'ex-wife-to-be'. There were still divorce papers to explain.

"Speaking of which," she offered up, "and before you ask any more questions, know that I Ellie was not spying on you. I got in contact with her - limited contact - about a year ago and made her promise not to tell you about me or Charlie, or I would vanish. I didn't give her a choice; I put her in an impossible position. Her 'spying' was little more than answering my questions about you, Chuck."

A knock on the door. Ellie and Charlie.

Sarah jumped up. "Let me answer it." Before Chuck could respond, Sarah rushed and opened the door. Ellie stood there, a still-sleeping Charlie in her arms. Ellie gave Sarah a quick, inspecting sweep, head to toe. "Well, no blood. That's a good sign," she breathed.

Sarah stepped aside and Ellie came in. Sarah closed the door and followed Ellie to the kitchen. Chuck stood up. He greeted Ellie and the little girl with an expression of disbelief. After a moment, he frowned at his sister. She winced slightly. Then she stepped toward him. The little girl was still asleep, her curls spinning this way and that on her head, her lips, Sarah's, pursed in a dreaming smile.

Chuck took her in his arms with exquisite care. Still sleeping, Charlie stuck her thumb in her mouth and began sucking on it. Chuck wept.

And so did Sarah and Ellie.

Charlie slept.

Ellie wiped her eyes, crossed the kitchen floor to her brother, and took Charlie. He gave her up reluctantly. Once Ellie had her, Chuck wiped his eyes with his forearm and turned to the sink. He threw up in it.

Without thinking, Sarah was at his side, her arm across his back, her hand on his opposite shoulder. She could hardly see him through her tears, but she made a comforting sound.

He pushed her away. But he looked...better.

"Don't," he commanded flatly, dropping his shoulder to make her remover her hand. "Just don't."

He grabbed a sheet of paper towel from a roll, wet it in the sink, and wiped his face. He ran water in the sink as he did, to wash the risen bile away.

He threw the wet paper towel away and got another sheet, drying his face with it. He threw it away and faced Sarah.

She had hurt him before, too many times: when she lied under the truth serum when she froze him out after their first kiss, when she chose Bryce after Barstow. Shaw. But the look he gave her then, the raw and utter pain of it, made her step back and catch her breath. He was not hiding any of the pain from her. Getting sick seemed to have steadied him, clarified him.

"So," Chuck said, his voice exact and intense, "let me see if I understand. You walked away from me on the beach for reasons you cannot fully explain, but because you loved me. You ran back to the CIA, back into deep cover because you didn't want to love me. You discovered you were pregnant and spent, what, almost two years, beginning to end, on that assignment. Gave birth, cared for...our daughter. You escaped. You and your memory. And Charlie." He glanced at the small beauty in his sister's arms.

"And that was a year ago or so. A year. You contacted my sister, but not me and kept up with me through her. But I hear nothing from you. Nothing. Nothing." His voice rose in intensity but not in volume, the low sound somehow worse than a shout. "Nothing - until I get _the fucking _divorce papers? Can you explain that to me?"

Before Sarah could answer, Ellie broke in. "Shit. That's where we are in the discussion? I will take the little one to the bedroom and put her down. I'll stay with her." Ellie was looking at Sarah but shifted to Chuck. "Keep your voices down. I'll come for my punishment later."

She left the kitchen, finding her own way to the bedroom.

When Sarah looked back at Chuck, his face twisted oddly, his eyes squeezed closed.

"Chuck, did you just flash?"

He gaped at her. "No. No. I haven't flashed...in a long time. I still have it," he held up his arm left arm, showing her the familiar watch, the governor. "It doesn't seem to damage me or help me. It just sits there, gathering dust. And, you've not had any more problems, even after your exposure undercover?"

She shook her head. "No, the CIA did some testing. All normal."

They stood silent. Chuck looked at the floor. Sarah gathered her courage. "If it wasn't a flash, what was it?"

He took a moment. "A realization."

"Of what?"

"Talian Law."

"Is that from Star Trek? I don't remember that."

He smiled sadly. "No, Sarah, but that's a good guess. Funny, that not-remembering does show that you remember."

Sarah blinked in half-understanding. Chuck went on. "No, it's from history. I won't bore you with the details, but you know the heart of it, everyone basically does. _An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. _Talian Law. When Ellie said 'punishment', it came to mind."

Sarah felt the moments of hope she had been trying to hold onto vanish, like fireflies on a dark summer night. She forced herself to look him in the face. "What is my punishment, Chuck?" A whisper. "If you want the divorce, I will work things out with Charlie. I can, I will move out here - there's nothing keeping me where I am - and we can raise her together, but apart."

She thought about her own childhood, the parental tug-of-war that stretched and tore her heart as a child; she did not want that for Charlie. But the thought of living near Chuck, of raising their daughter, together but not together, made her feel sick.

She was so fucking tired of _together-not-together. _Call it whatever you want, dress it up as a distended romance or glacial foreplay - in the last analysis, it was _not-together. Apart. _Maybe she had liked it, a little, in those early days in Burbank. There had been an undeniable thrill in the uncertainties. The thrill of theft over honest toil. But it was childishness - a refusal to take on the adult obligations of the heart, an attempt to have a commitment without paying a commitment's price. _Free lunch_. Romantic cowardice parading itself as a love of romance. _Cowardice_.

_Too afraid to have him and too afraid to lose him._

She had been a coward from the beginning until now, from the beginning to...the end. Now, it looked like the best she could hope for would be an everlasting _together-not-together_, an everlasting _not-together._

Still facing him, she waited for him to speak. He did, at last. His words, oddly, rhyming with her own thoughts.

"Talian Law was better than earlier forms of justice. It at least tempers justice with proportion: an _eye _for an _eye _\- not a _life _for an _eye_.

"But it's still a childish understanding of justice. Think about it: if you take my eye, then Talian Law says that justice _demands_ that I take yours. If I can, but don't, _I've_ done something wrong. Mercy is...impermissible. And that's crazy, morally _crazy_. At any rate, I don't endorse it, I won't live by such a brutal, stupid code. I never have." She saw him grow self-conscious. "Sorry, I didn't mean to…" He shook his head. "What I mean is that I will not punish anyone, not you, not Ellie. I don't know if I can forgive you, but to hell with an eye for an eye."

He went to the fridge and got a bottle of water for himself. He opened it, took a drink, swished it in his mouth, then spit it out in the sink, reached under the sink and got a spray bottle of cleaner, sprayed the sink, turned on the faucet and, with another paper towel, washed it out. Sarah watched, felt home settling over her.

Cleaning Chuck was a familiar sight, a memory she had often revisited in her time without him, after her memory returned. It had calmed her, located her. When she remembered it, she could find her feet.

He finished up and looked at her. "So, are you going to tell me the rest? Why you stayed away? Why you sent those papers with no explanation?"

She nodded. "Can we sit back down?"

They did. As she sat, Chuck caught her hand and gave it a quick squeeze. "She's so beautiful, Sarah. Thank you for her and for saving her. No matter what happens, my life just got inestimably better. I can't wait to meet her."

It was too much. The hand squeeze, all he had said, all the tensions of the day, the weeks, the years. Sarah collapsed into tears, unable to speak.

* * *

Chuck was struggling to hold himself together. He was a mass of conflicting impulses. He wanted to run to the bedroom and wake Charlie and interact with her. Or, maybe, just let her sleep but watch her. She was a miracle, _dea ex machina_, a tiny goddess craned into his life from the heavens.

He wanted to shout at his sister, to share his outrage with her. He wanted to take the love of his life - because, God help him, that is what Sarah was, tonight had proven it - into his arms and comfort her. And be comforted. He wanted to collapse onto the kitchen floor, curl up fetally, and forget his life, forget the Intersect, forget Sarah, forget it all, go back to pointless Buy More days and Xbox nights with Morgan, bad Subway _faux_-subs.

He hurt all over and he had been hurting for so long. Since that first date-not-date, when he discovered the beautiful blonde was not there for him but for his flashy new creepy reptilian brain of 1's and 0's, the goddamn Intersect. But it had never been about the Intersect for Chuck, or about saving Burbank or the country or the world - it had been about, been all about her. He meant it on the beach when, prefacing their story, he had noted that he got the Intersect and then that his life had really changed when he met a spy named Sarah. It was that change in his heart, not the Intersect's change in his head, that counted.

He really didn't want to punish her, no matter how appealing that seemed when he was in the grip of anger. He wasn't going to return harm for harm. He loved her, God, how he loved her. He would not punish her. But he wanted to understand - so much still made little sense. He got up and scooted his chair toward hers, and he took her in his arms. She tried feebly to resist, but then she allowed it, and then she sank into his embrace. She wept onto his shirt. The scent of her slowly surrounded him and he felt at home in his own apartment for the very first time. He noticed that the off-white walls were bare.

Sarah sat back, then reached out and straightened his shirt where she had leaned against it. She glanced up at him. Suddenly, they were kissing each other. It was like their first kiss, fueled by long-pent desire and need, but also fueled by so many other things, the pain of the past.

Chuck lost himself in the kiss. It went on and on and on. But then he felt her push him away. He gazed into her eyes. "You know what, I don't care. I just care that you are here, that Charlie is here…"

"I love you for that, Chuck, but I care. I mean that I have to tell you. I can't do what I always do, and just leave everything unexplained. I'm not sure I can explain, in fact, I'm sure I can't - but you need to know that. All I can do is tell you what I was thinking, not justify myself."

She sat back in her chair and took a breath. She touched her lips, then noticed him staring at her hands as she did. Chuck felt himself blush. She smiled at him...smiled _that _way at him, and he felt a tremble course through him.

He forced himself to calm down, to focus, to integrate his conflicting impulses. Although the kiss had not calmed him down, it had focused him marvelously, pulled him together. His focus was both mental - and physical. He adjusted himself in his chair to hide his physical focus.

Sarah was flushed, he could see that. She seemed, like him, to be trying to recover from the kiss. She glanced at him, suddenly almost bashful. "That's the first time I have been kissed since the beach."

"I can't say the same," Chuck confessed after a moment. "I kissed Taylor. But we never...we…"

Sarah held up her hand. "It's okay, you don't have to tell me anything about that. I sent you the divorce papers. You weren't...cheating on me."

"But that's why I didn't…"

"Huh?"

"It felt like cheating any time I thought about it. I only want to sleep with my wife…"

Sarah's flush renewed. Chuck realized he had spoken in the present tense. Sarah smiled but then frowned. "Your ex-wife-to-be…"

"Tell me about the papers, Sarah."

"I'm not sure I can explain it, Chuck. I didn't come home once we were safe. And that's what I should have done. But so much had happened. And although some of it was, in a way, not my fault, in another way it all was. It all resulted from my stupid decision to walk away on the beach. I should have stayed. A brave woman would have stayed, and trusted her heart. I was right about one thing - in that state, memory-less, I did only know how to be a spy. So I ran from the light back into the shadows where I felt safe. Crazy, I know. I feel unsafe with you on a daylight beach and safe in deep cover among rogue spies. But Chuck, that changed when Charlie was born and my memory was reborn."

"How so?"

"I knew I was Sarah Bartowski - and I only wanted to be your wife. I did not want to be Agent Walker, but I had to be to get us out." She paused. "You know, Chuck, although I've been bad-to-worse at it, I have been your wife since I touched your hand at the altar of the Buy More."

"At the Nerd Herd desk?"

"The altar."

"So, why not come home to me and bring me our daughter? You were planning to come back when you went undercover, that's what you said, right?"

"Yes, and I was. But, as weird as this sounds," her chin dipped, "getting my memories back made my desire to come back and my fear of coming back both worse. Chuck, I finally not only felt, I understood what I had walked away from, and for a long time, I could not forgive myself for that, not even with my legitimate excuses, such as they were. You don't realize this, Chuck, and all your joking about running away from danger and about my ninja-likeness obscured it, but when it comes to you..._I am a coward_.

"Ellie said to me - out in the car - that I've been too afraid to have you and too afraid to lose you _all at once. _And she's right, that's the basic problem. I couldn't just woman up and love you, the amazing surprise gift that you are, and run the risks of loving you. So, I kept trying to claim the benefits and avoid the risks, and all I did was hurt us both. They only give benefits to the risk-taker. We try to make bargains with reality and cut corners. But all we end up with are knock-offs of the things we want."

Chuck grinned, a sneaky grin.

"What is it?"

"Knock-offs...or knocked-up."

She bumped his shoulder with hers. "Gah. Very funny, Mister. But I was afraid, and Charlie made it worse. There was so much to lose, so much I thought I had already lost. And I didn't want to seem like she was my Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. I got in touch with Ellie to find out what was going on with you. She told me you were outwardly okay but inwardly miserable. I kept telling myself I would come and bring Charlie and explain...try to explain. But I couldn't find the words. I just kept imagining versions of what happened when you found me in here, looking at the picture."

Chuck glanced toward the living room. "About that - Taylor shattered it on the coffee table, so…"

"I'm sorry for her, Chuck. I know how she feels."

"I'm sorry too. We seem to have the power to make our unhappiness spill over onto innocent victims," Chuck whispered, in self-recrimination. He glanced at the bedroom.

"Let's stop doing that, Chuck."

He didn't respond to that; he shifted topic. "So, the divorce papers?"

"A spy tactic, I'm ashamed to say. Ashamed. I can't offer an excuse for it either, no more than walking away. I had reasons but no excuses…

"Ellie did not seem to be able to decide on your feelings for Taylor. I had decided to come back, to bring Charlie, when Ellie told me about Taylor. I stalled. When it looked like it might be...a thing...I sent the papers.

"I didn't want to ruin your new happiness. But I hoped you'd refuse to sign and get furious...because of our prenup. I'm not blaming you, Chuck, but I couldn't understand why you just let me go. Not that I gave you any choice, but…That was another reason I was slow about coming back...But…you don't give up."

Chuck had dropped his head. "I lost faith, Sarah. I kept thinking you would come home. But you never did, day after miserable day. I started scoring it all, like an asshole, telling myself it was your move. I told you our story, kissed you as you asked. It now was...your turn."

"Damn it," Sarah breathed, "I did the same thing, even more unfairly, since you did not know where I was or what was going on and I still kept telling myself that the next move was yours. I used the divorce papers like a chess clock to force you to move. I interpreted your signing them as your signing the death certificate on us…"

She heard him inhale, and again she braced herself for anger again. Instead, he spoke so that she almost couldn't hear him. "I suppose I was. Fair or not, you didn't interpret it wrong. That was the day I finally stopped believing, even a little, in some corner of my heart, that you would come back. Ellie must have understood what you were doing. When I told her about the papers, she told me not to sign. To fight. Call the lawyer. Demand a face-to-face meeting. She'd been after me all along, but it got worse just before Taylor and I...understand that now. It was Ellie trying to tell me, or at least of getting me to try to save myself. I'm sorry, Sarah, I messed up."

She reached out to him, put her hand on his knee. "No! Don't apologize to me, Chuck. I'm the one who's sorry. But if we start to apologize now, we may never stop Just know that I, Sarah Bartowski, am sorry."

"At least you came back. Late, really late, but you did. You tried to save us."

Sarah laughed bitterly. "Like the woman who gave CPR to the man she had been drowning."

He laughed at that too, bitterly.

He looked at her, a wan smile on his face. "I can't do any more of this tonight, Sarah. My heart can't take it. Tomorrow?"

* * *

She smiled hesitantly, unsure what he was asking. "Sure, tomorrow, ...after we're divorced."

His face did not fall. In fact, the wan smile gained strength. "True. But we'll still be Chuck and Sarah."

Sarah then did a very brave thing, surprising herself. She stood and pulled the golden rings from her pocket and then held them out to Chuck in her open hand. He glanced up at her then took the rings. She held her breath.

He took the rings and held them in his closed hand as if weighing them. Then he used his other hand to take up her left hand, and he put the rings on her with the same care he used when he held Charlie for the first time.

* * *

Chuck and Sarah woke Ellie. He had fixed the couch for her to sleep on it. She saw them standing together, then she saw Sarah's rings. She suppressed an unsurprised smile. She got up slowly, so as not to wake Charlie. Chuck walked with her back to the living room.

"So, is everything okay?"

"No, but it's better - with a bullet."

"Chuck, it's you two. How about no firearms metaphors? You know, there's nothing you two can't do together, but you are nothing apart, shadows of yourselves, your substance in the other's heart."

"I know. We'll do better this time."

"I think so. No matter how angry you are, or how nick-of-time her timing, she came, Chuck. Even after you moronically signed the divorce papers she moronically sent you. Morons, both."

He nodded again. "I know."

Ellie covered herself with the blanket Chuck had put on the couch. "That little girl, she's an angel, Chuck. You're a lucky man. And if you say _I know _again, I'll get up and give your ass the kicking for which it's been begging for almost three years."

"I…"

Ellie's glare cut him off. He went back to the bedroom. Sarah was in bed next to Charlie. She was wearing one of Chuck's t-shirts. "I brought nothing to sleep in - I brought nothing at all."

"Figures." Chuck smiled at her. "You know, I was thinking about an eye for an eye again."

Sarah tensed, blinked. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. You know, part of what's wrong with it is that it is backward-looking. It sees today and tomorrow in terms of yesterday. But mercy, while it knows the past, is forward-looking, hoping for better tomorrow, that mercy itself will help to bring about that better tomorrow."

"What do you want to do tomorrow, Chuck?"

"I want to meet my daughter, so she can know me."

Sarah smiled. "She doesn't know your face, but she knows you. When my memories came back, I told them all to her. Our story has been her story from the beginning, Chuck. I've told her over and over. She knows we came on the plane to find her _dada, _the brave hero of my story, her story, our story."

Chuck's throat tightened and his eyes got wet. He looked down at his daughter. "I wish I had seen her when she was just a baby."

Sarah gave him a frowny smile. "That guard, the one that brought Charlie fruit, he smuggled in a film camera, an old one. I have lots of pictures Chuck - although the background is pretty much always the same. They're in my purse, but it's locked in the trunk of Ellie's car. It's not all that you should have had but it's something. Should I go get them?"

"Tomorrow. So, what do you want to do tomorrow, Sarah?"

"Get a marriage license, if you'll have me, Chuck Bartowski."

He grinned at her, his familiar, world-righting grin. "I'll see if you can talk me into it in the morning," he waggled his brows, "...and _after_?"

"Surprise me, Chuck."

Chuck got in bed on the other side. Charlie was between them.

But they were not _together-not-together. _They were all together.

"Thank you, Chuck," Sarah said as Chuck turned off the light.

"What for?"

"For mercy. For tomorrow."

"Thank you, Sarah."

"What for?"

"For giving me a life it was so hard to lose."

* * *

Chuck smiled in the dark, thinking about his own words. On the eve of his divorce, Chuck felt well and truly married.

* * *

A/N2: Fadeout.

Story Closing Theme: Hem, _Idle (The Rabbit Song)_

This was a tribute to the show but also to my favorite genre of movies, the comedy of remarriage. (_The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve, etc._)


End file.
